It saddens me to see the direction law makers are going in America today.
I remember when you could go to a concert and bring in a flask.
You could smoke,drink and do as you pleased, find your thing, while enjoying the show.
The music was rich. The heat from the audience electric, kinetic,
giving off wattage,, building into lightening bolts,,
enhancing for me a feeling of joy and oneness
The soft, warm glow of freedom came over me
a bond, a communion, we had pecking order and social rules we abided by.
We knew we had something real, something special,to protect and even die to keep..
We were a no holds barred nation others could only watch with envy.,,
We showed the world how to let our hair down and party.
We encouraged and supported alternative thought
and supported and grandfathered in
new, innovative ways to work, what our social responsibility really was,
and a true, merging of father time with mother nature on the world stage., .
Anyone could visit America and fly their freak flag.
Do things they might never consider doing back home..
You could experiment with new lifestyles and new social currencies.
Drugs, meditation, yoga, sex, new age religion. It was a beautiful time of experimentation and discovery..
We had L.A. Vegas, New York. Atlantic City and so many other uniquely wonderous, exciting hot spots..
specialty locations where you could enjoy a memorable experience to take back home with you,
wherever your home may have been.
With freedom comes responsibility. So, the lawmakers andThe naysayers decreed
We had fewer right to learn through risk taking, exposure to new people and lifestyles
Stealing our birthright to make our necessary mistakes
to reach a more 'productive' path.
One size fits all of us, which is fascism under an alias. Painful as the crushing
loss of personal identity, under unwavering, Red Chineseque, rigid compliance.
We can feel patriotic, but not with fear the far off gaze of the soldier's eyes,, faces forward, to the front,
on their customary lemming march blindly marching over a high cliff,
committing suicide, crushed, on the rocks below . .
Morphing freedom, into a cheap be all you can be slogan.
You know when you are free
and the price of it, when you are not free and you're paying dearly to taste it again.
It's too easy to act like marauding cossacks and run over the peasantry.
These children were weaned on tire marks..
Visit America today and go attend a concert. As a paricipant in the audience, you get screened, watched, searched,
when you enter we've gotten over run by security,
Have fun at your own peril. It's best to blend in, act stiff, put on a wary smile, if you can. Deal with it, right? .
It breaks my heart to be frisked, like I am a criminal inmate, To not feel trusted at security checkpoints,
checking bags, backpacks and purses for contraband.
The light hearted spontenaity is gone.. The drinking age has been lifted up from 18 and 19 to 21. That is an abomination since, how do adults suddenly start drinking responsibly at a bar beginning at age 21. Oh, I have my drinking license now. Let's drink a pitcher of beer and do jello shots. This is a recipe for disaster for them and the rest of us....Our children have become way too serious, and dangerously self analytical, Little wonder now that everyone has some diagnoses, facing them when confronted with this harsh social criterion.
Many otherwise healthy kids, don't know how to interact with one another without some kind of therapy session mediating the event.
The law making regulators have really done a number on ,my contemporaries and their children..
If you don't work, you don't eat. That was what Trump said on camera to us.
Well, who wants to be compelled to work if they aren't free agents?
Sure meaningful, work is important for nurturing the soul.
To feel useful To feed our family.. To start and finish a job. It's always been honorable logging another productive day's work..
But, there are so many damaged people in management positions who've made the reward of working impossible
creating a mass exodus from the workplace., in part because it had been a primary place where you have personal validation,.That validation for sweat equity is too often rationed, withheld or used as ,messy bargaining chip.
I live in a retirement housing project where residents are allowed dogs and cats
. I can't help but wonder, when I see so many sad pet faces, if these animals are all the residents have dominion over..
Like entry level slaves. Because, the residents have no power in other facets of their lives.
We have no power have no say regarding how tall the shrubs are going to be.
What trees are going to live or be cut down
. Or when the the leaf blower starts his engines outside our door in the early morning.
We get a small tax break for living here as elders. But, it feels more like a punishment than a benefit.
How dare us not own our own homes on our own land at this age. We must be punished.
. We live a mere 20 feet away from an interstate freeway.
.America has a huge homeless problem.They can't figure out why? Richest nation in the world and all.
The policy makers, during an election year, Big plans to house everyone.
It's sure to happen,
Maybe next month,
maybe next year..
But, these are feel good soundbites,
cheap talk,. puts some of the rest of us more at ease.
. .What I don't see is action taken to make life a little easier just
during daylight hours for these folks
Folks in transition, travelling, folks, or those who found themselves in a hellish jail
in this monopoly game.. the corporations haven't volunteered to install public access areas with public day lockers,
. Little mention of centrally located indoor meeting places
places to go to get out of the heat, or the rain
Where everyone can. have proximity with anyone socially
play some cards get a free cup of coffee or a sandwich, or plan their next move
. A coming together of unlikely actors
Networks bringing promise and, hope of a day gig
.When will big businesses doing business again understand their true mission is to bring like
and unlike people together..
To support community, infrastructure, to set aside some profits to create spaces for activity centers on their home turf.
A connected workplace with employees who get exposure to more than just other insurance execs and sales reps
, Lawyers getting exposure from doctors and nurses,,
Not cloistered in with other lawyers, insurancee people and medical workers.
To glean a wider perspective from those who aren't in our same or similar professional spheres gives critically vital, fresh new exposure.
,creating an atmosphere of true Brotherhood and understanding.
The fact that stratification, an apartheid, of this proportion, culturally, politically, racially endemic,
and reinforced in the work place is disheartening that it appears to be planned this way,
in so many areas of our lives, creating perps and victims. Helpers and the needy.
. Good guys rescuing vulnerable potential victims from the bad guys whose often are actually heroes taking the risk to make wayward contact
, reaching out to end their exclusionary status. It wasn't too long ago when sitting at the front of a bus was s a crime for darker skinned people.
. .Apatheid is back and trending. a policy ripe for hostilities. Responsible for religious, racial and class warfare..
Fanning the flames of tensions leading to gratuitious violence, fostering a cycle of isolation, and mental dis-ease,
Killing, depression, additction,.suicide, This lone wolf trend has certainly damaged the arts,
along with most every other facet of healthy social interaction.
People are crazy about sports. The last remaining unsanctioned, vestige of pecking order.
.Even sports figures are taking a knee and saying enough.
. Folks are tweaking and maybe taking desperate actions\
because so many of us have found ourselves looking from behind the glass at this strange new world
.. And, now they are bullet proofing the glass..
It must be planned because this catastrophe couldn't have occured by accident.
Compounded by the information super highway and the pandemic,
we now have a recipe for an further us against them disaster.
We have a plethora of different categories, defining our gender, and sexual orientation
. But, we can't seem to figure out how to go on a date or a mixer, to discover if we're compatible with another human being.
One group of people arbitrarily, get's their freedom while another group is condemned for being abberant and lawless
. In a free society, everyone has their day in court to plead their case why their rights command protection.
This isn't happening. so, now there is blowback.
Abortion rights, for example, are being cut back in many States
Women are paying dearly because, god forbid you have unprotected sex and get pregnant
. Another power grab. What is a right? But, a granting of a special privalege sanctioned by a law made by men.
Men can take away your privaleges at any time.
A treaty on the reservation is only as good as the prevailing poltiical winds of the Federal government.
If this is true for 'supposed' soveriegn Indian Nations, then how secure our anyone's rights?
One of the worst injustices of recent times is how
I see quality young men and women not knowing how to form bonds, and communicate with one another.
They have been frighthtfully estranged by draconian, puritan court rulings on, sex laws in schools and on the streets,
where there is an authority coming into their bedrooms and tightly controlled administrations at the colleges.
We fought hard for our rights to date. To make mistakes and to accept the danger of dating
. Nobody came down from any mountain top with tablets saying to us, let there be risk free dating
. I loosely quote Camille Paglia when I say that/ Who said in the sixties, women students were locked in their dorm rooms with a curfew at 10:00 pm
She, as a sixties freedom fighter, fought the administrations and demanded they get out of our sex lives.\
The administrations capitulated and soon their were co-ed dorms.
Where else can you learn about sex and choices and such if you are isolated,
and cloistered in your same sex room at ten pm.
To learn how to deal with inky blotches of lust
coming at us is a worthy tool to have in our tool boxes.
Now, if you whistle at an attractive woman, ,
that's predation, criminal exploitation.. These hysterical abuse policy harms both women and men
as It infantaizes us all..
Healthy women in their prime child birthing years are walking around with whistles, tasers and tear gas..
Well, how do you learn how to better interact and socialize, to meet and greet, others, to have options, choices, than by
slogging through to come on the other side, stronger from a heated sexual encounter.
. Make a flirting error today and you could wind up locked in a gulag for many years.
I lived in a State where they enacted sexual misconduct laws with eight levels of severity
From cat calling all the way up to actual rape.
Sure, you punish a rapist to the fullest extent of the law,
but you don't limit interactions or banish all behaviors where there is a potential
for an
unpleasant experience for one or both of the actors]\.
Everything encounter has context.
If we, take out the context, we've sanctioned legal insanity.
.A punitive atmosphere for trying to go for what you desire
and aspire to get in the sexual arena.
To just give up.
Fosters, paranoia,hyper analysis, putting
a microscope on every move before making it.
hesitate too long and opportunity is lost...
This grade school policy doesn't strengthen our citizens
. It further diminishes our quality of life, by taking away free will.
forcing outcomes into never taking shape.
for fear of life altering legal consequences.
So, addiction is a by-product of being force fed these restrictions.
They have made marijuana legal again in many places.
A drug to deaden our senses to the pain from our social rights being shredded.
If we stay high, you don't really see or are less aware of all that is being taken from us.
Medicating your way out of fascism isn't going to work
because one day you will wake up and
talk to someone in a park and they will tell you that you are crazy for engaging them. Until they realize you don't want anything from them.
You just wanted to make contact with another human being on neutral ground,. That you aren't a mental patient out on furlough.
Who talks to strangers anymore. I mean, what would the neighbors think.
It's gotten so bad that I have had to talk about it to wrap my head around this
crack in the space/time continuum.
When I was a child, our teacher talked about India
They said they have a caste system.
They said they have the high caste of the Brahmans
down to the lowest caste being the Untouchables.
I thought, wow, that's so horrible. How could that be
How could that happen in the world.
When I grew up, I realized it's very similar here.
You have a subspecies, if I may use that term
A species of feral
people, living outside separate,
and lightyears away from the affluent. Brahmans.
In different realms, not able or equipped to communicate meaningfully to
each other.
Completely different lives and economies.
.
Surviving day to day, travelling from place to place.
I also hear alot about Red China
How everywhere their are camera's watching them. .
How they behave, [publicly,
affects their reputation score assigned to them..
But, we too have cameras, reputation and credit scores.
Criminal records here often follow us from cradle to grave.
Whole families who are blackisted from communities
. I have heard of folks being kicked out of towns.
We are lazer quick to judge.
Our richest one percent owns maybe half of the wealth in this country.
I heard that the 400 richest families hold forty percent of the wealth.
If this is even partly true,
it may explain political gridlock, and why the rest of us are pretty much left out in the cold.
Relegated into arm twisted positions in the shadows
Slotted into unnatural conditions of compliance.
Not trusted,surveilled, discounted, tossed aside, and dismissed....
.
.Buddy Bee Anthony
All editing and publishing rights reserved as is by this author
Re edited 12/04/2022 @ 7:57 AM Pacific Standard Time